Page 80 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
Elijah takes one step forward.
That’s enough.
“Luis Carrero,” he blurts. “They all answer to Luis Carrero. Houston side, that’s him.”
The name lands in the middle of us and changes the shape of the room.
Lucian gets to his feet slowly, like this part was always inevitable. He steps aside and gives Elijah the smallest nod.
Elijah doesn’t say a word.
He just moves.
This time there’s no stopping him. No one tries. Not Christian, not Lucian, not me.
The first hit takes the dealer out of the chair.
After that it stops being a fight and starts being an ending.
I watch it.
Not because I want to.
Because I can’t look away.
There’s something in me that recoils from it, and something else in me, something darker and harder and sick with everything that’s happened to Lia, that feels grim satisfaction every time the man tries to move and can’t.
By the time Elijah is done, the dealer is dead.
The silence that follows it feels different to the one before.
Lucian steps back beside me, folding one hand loosely over the other as if we’ve just finished a meeting instead of watched a man beaten to death on a warehouse floor.
“Elijah is a man who needs to work through his body,” he says quietly. “That’s how he survives what’s in him.”
I keep my eyes on the body.
“And you,” he continues, “already struggle with control of your body, which means if you try to survive the same way, you’ll destroy yourself.”
That lands too cleanly to argue with.
“If you are going to be with Lia,” he says, “then you are with Elijah by default, and in turn with the Bellandi family. That means you do not remain some soft thing on the edge of all this hoping it never touches you. It means you become an asset. It means you become someone who can protect what is yours.”
I finally look at him.
There’s no performance in him. No manipulation I can see. Just absolute certainty.
“I’ll show you how,” he says. “So you never have to feel that helpless again, and so when the time comes, you can stand equal to Elijah at his side instead of behind him. You will need to be a family. Not divided.”
The words sit there between us.
Heavy.
Real.
I know what yes means. I know the lines it closes. I know there is no clean version of my life on the other side of it.
Then Lia rises in my mind again, not soft or distant, but exactly as she was on that bed, drugged and cut and half-lost inside herself, and every other thought falls away.
